


Moros Mews

by Cluegirl



Series: The Moirae Set [5]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has a private ritual of comfort for when the pressures of the world get too heavy.  It's not exactly safe, or sane, but it's better than killing someone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moros Mews

Kreacher met Harry at the front door; all silent, translucent reproach as Harry levitated in yet another hamper of Molly Weasley’s biscuits, meat pies, and compulsive mothering from the stoop. The hamper had a charm to keep the water off, and a savage anti-tampering jinx to keep everything else but Harry off. Just like the other three she’d sent since Sunday.

“It’s just she knows you can’t cook for me anymore,” he explained, stepping around the small, grim ghost, and juggling the hamper as he shrugged out of his jacket and scarf. “And… she’s used to feeding Ron. And she doesn’t think I can cook for myself, I guess. Anyway, she doesn’t mean any insult, I’m sure.”

Kreacher, clearly unimpressed, snapped his fingers and made Harry’s jacket and scarf leap from his hands, then slither like smoke into the hall cupboard. Then he faded out all Cheshire-like, leaving his glower for last, in case Harry had missed the signs of his displeasure.

The library floo was chiming against its blocking charm. Harry could see green flares, like miniature and very frustrated fireworks painting the empty shelves as it pinged and pinged. Only Hermione would be that persistent, he decided as his stomach turned cold. Ron would have come himself, and been battering at Harry’s door when he arrived home; Kingsley would have sent an owl, or an Auror squad to find him; and Skeeter… well, she’d have fried herself alive trying to creep through his wards if she’d taken a notion to come sniffing after rumors at Grimmauld Place again.

He sighed, scrubbed the back of his neck in frustrated weariness, and decided the floo could wait for as long as the silencing charm held. He wasn’t interested in tea or sympathy, let alone a lecture on how he ought to be making better use of his opportunities. Not tonight.

“I’ll just put this with the others,” he said to the empty room, and headed for the kitchen. Kreacher did not reply, but his beady eyes reappeared and they followed Harry down the hallway with an air of bulldog determination. When Harry merely slid that hamper into the cold storage cupboard with the others instead of fetching down his plate, cup and flatware, and seeing about his dinner, the ghostly House Elf’s scowl grew downright savage.

 _I didn’t know,_ Harry wanted to say, had wanted to say ever since the final time Kreacher had asked in vain for him to chop off his head, _You didn’t tell me why! You didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to leave if I didn’t! I just thought it was some gory Black Family thing, not the only freedom you could ever hope for…_ Instead, as had become usual, Harry choked the ashen equivocations down. Much good they’d do anybody now, after all. Kreacher was stuck with the picked-over shell of Grimmauld Place, much as Harry himself was.

The mail chute by the back door held its usual slouching stack of post, amplified by week’s neglect. Harry thought about opening a few, or at least searching through the slide for a name he recognized and wanted to hear from in the crowd of proposals, solicitations, castigations, threats, and gossip the Wizarding World tended to send to him. But the letter on top of the pile was from Ginny, and suddenly Harry could think of nothing he’d less rather do. The mail could wait another day. He was in no mood to read anyone’s kind (or otherwise,) regards just now. Not with the day he’d had.

“I’m going to have a bath,” he said, ostensibly to Kreacher, though he didn’t expect a reply. The old Elf’s voice seemed to have stopped when his breath did, but that didn’t mean he had any trouble making his opinions known. The cooker gave a rattle, and belched a sooty could into the air, just to prove the point as the ghost elf, hovering now before the cold storage chest, rolled his eyes in disgust and disappeared, though Harry of course he hadn’t gone far. “I just had a crap day, is all,” he said, and then felt foolish for trying to explain. And then he felt rather savagely angry over _having_ to explain. It was his own life, and his own bloody house, dammit! “I had a crap day, and I bloody well want some privacy. So don’t go opening the floo, or unlocking the doors, all right?”

The silence developed an edge of furious disgust to it, and Harry found himself wishing the Black family china hadn’t all been looted by the Death Eaters during the war, just so he could have the spiteful pleasure of smashing a piece or two. Instead, he stormed out of the kitchen. Then back in again, to grab a package of something from one of Molly’s hampers, as if that would appease either his house elf’s temper, or his own guilt.

Two pasties later, the tub was filling the master bathroom with steam as Harry banished the shadows with candle after candle. No _lumos_ for this little ritual, no magical lights that could fail suddenly and plunge him into darkness with only his demons for company. He’d learnt that lesson the last time. No, the cost of good beeswax candles was well worth it for the constant company of a dozen golden flames to witness his release.

He stripped his clothes off, kicked them all outside the room. Even odds as to whether Kreacher would remove them before Harry was done, or leave them there for him to trip over on his way out, but at that moment, Harry could not be bothered. His hands were beginning to shake now, his knuckles aching with the urge to clench into fists; his thighs trembling with the slow deliberation of his movements; back aching and rigid as if a plank could snap across it and not leave a bruise. His belly was a stone, his heart a seething mass of anger and disgust, his cock half wakened and twitching against his thigh as Harry locked the bathroom door and turned to shut off the taps.

He stood over the half-full tub, wand-tip pressed hard into one upturned palm as he watched the water toy with the glimmers of light, slowing, calming, stilling, even as his breath grew more and more ragged. It was fighting its way out of him, the dark thing he’d been choking back for weeks now, chewing through the last of his barriers in search of something beautiful to destroy. It had nearly slipped past him today, in the questioning room. It had almost grabbed Foyle, and showed him just how much power hands without magic in them could still have over his ugly little life, and Harry had _wanted_ it to, for all of three heartbeats.

He took a breath – a deep one, and focused his eyes on the serpents that twined their way up the antique sculpted tiles. He held the breath until his eyes began to swim, and then released it, laden and hissing with his will -- an effortless spell in the tongue of those who crawl on their bellies and see the world from below. 

It didn’t sound at all like “Sectumsempra”, but it had a very similar effect.

Blood burst from his palm in a black heaving relief, surging out between his fingers to plop thickly into the water, where it swirled like ink and memories. Harry sobbed a breath, giddy and sweating as the thick pressure in his throat unraveled, unspooled, and dripped out of the wound in his palm. Finally, finally it all had somewhere to go.

He threw his wand toward the vanity, distantly noted its clatter into the sink while keeping his eyes fixed, translating the fertile rage of the black beast inside him into serpentine curses that hissed and bled and swirled against the pale porcelain at his feet, each drop thick with bile. Nobody, dear, despised, dead, or anonymous escaped the litany unscathed; here, alone, he could say all the things he couldn’t say. All the things that poisoned his dreams and made his head ache in the morning.

Here, in this candlelit arena nobody living would hear him, nor understand the words slithering between his teeth if they could have done; nobody would come find him later, hurt and angry at what they’d read out of context in the papers; nobody would complain to the Ministry that their pocket Hero was anything short of reasonable, well-polished, and respectable. Here, alone with his candles and his bath and his private bleeding ceremony, Harry could go of every seething thing he had choked down for the past fortnight.

When his head began to swim, and his arm to chill; when the bath water was black in the gloom, and boiling with resentment; when he could find no more words in any language that would fit around the disgust anymore, Harry ended it. He slashed a transfiguration spell at the bloody water without a thought for his wand, and hissed a greeting at the great, fluid serpent shape that raised its head glaring out of the tub, “Come and get me, you bastard!”

It hissed, fangs gleaming like sabers of ice for all of a second, and then it struck. Harry caught it, this monster he’d conjured out of his dark half, caught it and fought it -- all hands and heels, teeth and nails. No restraint, no rules, no good or evil to frame the fight in terms of politics and press; he didn’t have to be the nice one, didn’t have to hold back in case someone got hurt. 

He didn’t have to search for a reason to keep fighting as the slippery coils lashed and bashed about him, and the fangs slashed so near his flesh that they left splatters of pink poison behind them. This was life he was fighting for, man against monster, and Harry poured every ounce of his will into it, relishing the freedom to spend all his strength against something he could freely and whole-heartedly hate. He wanted to fight now, as much as he’d struggled not to lash out before. Now he battled to live, to destroy, to triumph, to survive, to feel fully the mechanisms of his body as it labored to contain his darkness given shape and agency.

Even his ribs creaking and cracking against the serpent’s massive, watery coils grounded Harry, even his lungs’ futile struggle to fill a chest that had no room to expand was a relief. His bleeding palm ground into the serpent’s throat, elbow and wrist locked, even as his fingers weakened, and his grip slid over the not-flesh of the thing. Even the peril, and the narrowing grey of his vision calmed the part of Harry that had despised himself just a little bit every time he’d choked the poison back. 

_Better now,_ he decided. It was better. He was better. Safe enough again.

Safe enough.

He focused his eyes on the serpent’s head, finding it more solid, more defined than he’d remembered conjuring it before. Its diamond markings both horrible and familiar, sketched in scarlet against the glimmering darkness the water held within it. It… she seemed overjoyed to see him.

His gasp won him just a fraction of a breath, but it was enough. He hissed his command, “Drop dead,” the trigger that would undo his spell, and collapse Harry’s personal monster back into a welter of water, blood, and bad words. 

Except that it didn’t. The giant snake, Harry’s water-boggart – definitely bigger than it had been, -- did not dissolve, and did not release him. Its grip did not even waver, though it did look amused as it flicked a scarlet tongue at his unshielded eyes. 

_Let it go too long,_ Harry realized, panic bursting from his pores in a sudden sweat, _Too much. Too big. I can’t…win._ Even his thoughts narrowed down to the laboring roar of blood in his head, pulsing like frantic heartbeats across his mind, dissolving into hiss and slur as the anger exhausted itself inside him, and slid headlong into surrender. He couldn’t win. Ah well.

It wasn’t the dying that vexed him, really, so much as the fact that he hadn’t meant to this time. And this time, he probably wasn’t going to get out of the Next Great Adventure – not with his ticket punched by his own bloody hands. What a waste.

Harry struggled for one last breath, and failed. The distant voice of his conscience ringing one final opinion as the darkness pulled him under. _Potter, you… imbecile…_


End file.
